Saturday, February 28, 2015

Born, most likely, in Moscow in 1895 (though she liked to say it was
Poland in 1902) to a wealthy family that emigrated, before the second
world war, first to Paris, and then to California and New York, de
Lempicka was glamorous, spoilt, demanding and bisexual. All of those
attributes emerged in her painting.

Two of the pictures here show at her dramatic best, and are even
stronger in the flesh than they are in the catalogue. The 1932 portrait
of Marjorie Ferry (pictured above), which Mr Joop bought in 1995 for
$500,000 and for which he is now asking $4m-6m, shows a figure
resembling Carole Lombard wrapped only in a sheet, casting a knowing
look over her shoulder. With her hair in gold twists and her sheet that
seems bent rather than draped, the texture is metallic as much as
celluloid, conjuring up the sleek gleam of cars in the age of speed.

Muscle
rather than metal is the theme of the 1925 portrait of Marika, the
Greek-born Duchesse de la Salle de Rochemaure, which carries the same
estimate. Tall, well-rounded and boasting a beauty spot above her lip,
the sitter has all of de Lempicka’s trademark characteristics, once
described as “lighting by Caravaggio, tubism by Fernand Léger and
lipstick by Chanel”. The picture radiates bisexual power. The Duchesse
appears at first to be wearing black riding jodhpurs tucked into her
boots, but when you look more closely it could just as easily be a black
skirt pulled up almost to the crotch to reveal a powerful inner thigh.

_______________________________________________________________

Sotheby's 2016

Tamara de Lempicka's sexy, bold and ultra-stylized Portrait de
Guido Sommi illustrates the sleek aesthetic of the Roaring Twenties,
and is a rare depiction of a male subject within the artist’s career
(estimate $4/6 million). The work comes to auction this November
from the collection of Kenneth Paul Block, one of the most influential
fashion illustrators of the 20th century, and Morton Ribyat, a noted
textile designer who ran the design departments at two major firms.
As the chief features artist for Women’s Wear Daily, Mr. Block was
well-known for his sophisticated drawings of the latest styles and the
women who wore them. For decades he drew the collections of major
American and European designers – from Norell, Halston and
Galanos, to Balenciaga, Chanel and Saint Laurent.

Tamara de Lempicka, Le rêve (Rafaëla sur fond vert) (1927) sold at Sotheby's New York on November 2, 2011 for $8,482,500.

A lost painting by artist Tamara de Lempicka, Nu adossé I, has been rediscovered and will appear on the auction block at Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern sale on May 2. 2012Sotheby's 2014

Friday, February 27, 2015

A rare masterpiece from the crucial decade in
which Dalí was creating his most famous imagery, Moment de transition is
one of only a handful of works of this calibre that have appeared at auction in
the last decade.

Transforming images were a pivotal subject of Dalí’s art in the 1930s, as he used his inventive

powers to undermine reality. The visual instability provoked by the experience of misreading a

given object or configuration could be both a source of pleasure and disquiet. Moment de

transition is a magnificent example of Dalí’s exploration of illusory perceptions within haunted

landscapes – in this case a Catalan landscape with a horse-drawn cart approaching a small,

distant town. However, at closer observation, the wheels of the cart are no more than two sticks

stuck in the ground, and the rider is revealed to be one of the buildings in the distant town. These

empty, melancholic landscapes dominated Dalí’s art in this period, as the artist returned to the

physical and emotional places that shaped his childhood memories.

Christie’s The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale on Tuesday 2 February 2016

Throughout much of 1928 Salvador Dali was greatly preoccupied with
ideas about anti-art, the establishing of a new-objectivity and the
exploration of what his new Catalan friend Joan Miró had recently
defined as ‘the assassination of painting’. Fishermen in the Sun
is the finest of a unique, distinctive and very rare series of six
relief-paintings made during this period in which Dali pioneered a
completely new stylistic direction in his work; of these six paintings,
four now reside in museums including the Fundación Gala-Salvador Dal,
Figueras and the Reina Sofía, Madrid (estimate: £700,000-£1,000,000).
In 1928, Dali embarked on a unique series of works that made use of
real, tactile, three-dimensional materials and reduced his already
amorphous and anamorphic forms to two-dimensional semi-abstract cyphers
that simultaneously suggested many different things at once. His aim was
to move beyond all the old ideas of painting while widening the
revelatory potential of his art to speak directly to man’s unconscious
mind. As Fishermen in the Sun highlights, Dali forged a series
of radically new psychic landscapes that, with their suggestions of an
atemporal sandy plain of strange hallucinatory possibility stretching
out beneath a strip of empty blue sky, lay the foundations for the
dramatic, hyper-realist paintings that he began his Surrealist career
with in 1929.

Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and
Modern Art on 2 May 2012

Printemps nécrophilique. Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and
Modern Art on 2 May 2012 was be led by Salvador Dalí's Printemps nécrophilique from 1936. Painted at the
height of the artist’s most creative years in Paris, the canvas exemplifies his unique aesthetic at its most refined
and sensational. Printemps nécrophilique has not appeared on the market in nearly 15 years and is estimated to
sell for $8/12 million*.

“Surrealism is the last great movement of 20th century modernism to be fully appreciated in the marketplace,
and a number of new benchmarks have been set just over the course of the last year,” commented Simon Shaw,
Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department in New York. “In February 2011, Sotheby’s set a
new record for a Surrealist work of art at auction when Salvador Dalí’s Portrait de Paul Eluard sold for $21.7
million. That same sale saw a new record for a work on paper by René Magritte set when his Le Maître d’École
brought just over $4 million. Just three months later, Sotheby’s set a new record for Paul Delvaux when his Les
Cariatides achieved $9 million. Surrealism continues to present exciting opportunities for collectors given the
wide range of material available at varying price points – literature, works on paper, paintings, sculpture and
objects – and the fact that great masterworks remain in private hands. Additionally, given that the roots of
much recent art lie in Surrealism, it crosses over well with collections of Contemporary art.”
By the time Dalí painted Printemps nécrophilique in 1936, he had established the style and the personal
iconography that characterizes his most successful
compositions. The eerie infusion of dreamscape with
hyper-real figural elements is a hallmark of the artist’s
approach. In the present work, Dalí depicts two figures
that offer a confounding combination of anonymity
and specificity. He envelops the figures in a wide
expanse of plains and sky, reminiscent of the endless
landscape of his native Catalonia. The lithe and
graceful male figure at left recalls the artist's own
profile, which will appear again in the artist's
masterpiece painted the next year, Métamorphose de
Narcisse. The flower-headed dominant female figure is
one of the artist's most memorable characters,
appearing in significant compositions such as Femmes
aux têtes de fleurs retrouvant sur la plage la dépouille
d'un piano à queue and staged in London for the 1936
International Surrealist Exhibition. The canvas was
originally owned by Elsa Schiaparelli, the couterière active in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. She
staged momentous events in Paris and occasionally collaborated with Dalí - their work together is explored in
detail in a current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.

Salvador
Dali Cinq
personnages surréalistes: femmes à tête de fleurs, femme à tiroirs
(évocation du jugement de paris)
Gouache, brush and
ink on pink paper
48.9 by 63.8cm; 191⁄4 by 251⁄8in.
Executed in 1937
Est. £400,000 - 600,000
Executed in 1937 as a
present for the renowned fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, this exquisite drawing
exemplifies the blend of hyperrealism and surreal metamorphosis that was a
hallmark of Dalí’s mature style. The work also brilliantly combines some of
the artist’s most iconic transformations of the female figure. Dalí
and Schiaparelli met in the 1930s and subsequently collaborated on a number of
projects. The fashion designer owned a number of works by the artist, including
both the present work – for which she apparently specified the use of pink
paper – and the earlier oil

Sotheby’s
London Surrealist Art Evening Sale on 5February
2013

One
of Salvador Dalí’s most accomplished portraits Portrait of Mrs Harrison Williams, was commissioned directly from
the artist and painted by him in 1943. Estimated at £1.5-2 million, the
painting – offered for the first time at auction - depicts Countess Mona
Bismarck (1897-1983), who was at the time of the portrait married to Harrison
Williams, reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in America.

After
their marriage in 1926 she swiftly became known as one of the most glamorous
and beautiful women of her day; becoming the first American to be acclaimed as
‘the best-dressed woman in the world’ by the luminaries of fashion.

Dalí's
dazzling depiction of the legendary Mona Bismarck is filled with classical
allusions and Surrealist symbolism making it one of the most ambitious pictures
he had produced by this point in his career. The painting was executed just
three years after Dalí arrived in New York City, having fled Paris with his
wife Gala in 1940. After his arrival, he was swiftly assimilated into the group
of European Surrealists that had coalesced there at the outbreak of World War
II. Together with them, he mingled with many of New York’s social luminaries, receiving
from them prestigious commissions for works such as this, and the portrait of
Helena Rubinstein sold at Sotheby’s New York for $2.65m in May 2011.

Sotheby’s
London February 2011 sale saw a record price at auction achieved for any work by
Salvador Dalí with the sale of

Girafe
en feu” (Giraffe on Fire), a large gouache on paper signed by Salvador Dalí in
1937 belongs to the early phase of Surrealism, rarely seen at auction these
days. Sotheby’s gave the rare work a $150,000 to $200,000 estimate. Obviously
too low, it could easily have been doubled. But the best specialists never
imagined that it might end up at $1.87 million, and set an auction record for
any work on paper by Dalí.

Salvador Dali’s 1941 Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape
is also fresh to the market. It was acquired directly from the artist
by its current owner, and has been seen in public only once since then,
at a Dali retrospective in Shanghai. Whereas Tanguy pushed back the limits of an inner universe ‘with no concession to the world of perception’ (André Breton), Dali
helped Surrealism enter the modern era by exploiting an image’s
cinematographic qualities. Our work (estimate €1.6m-2m) is a masterly
example of this approach.

Paradoxically, this small painting conveys the grandiose effect of a
cinema screening, with the monochrome composition seeming to capture the
light of the silver screen. Its dramatic, mesmerizing composition
features disturbing dream elements: a huge sewing-machine topped by
umbrellas that cast shadows on to an esplanade lined by an arcade, where
fashion models emerge beneath the arches. The sensual ambiguity between
the projected and recorded image, and between actual and virtual
reality, make this one of the first pictorial takes on cinema imagery.

PAINTING<>CINEMA: A TWO-WAY PROCESS

The Sewing-Machine was painted in 1941, during Dali’s
time in the United States. It heralds his first attempts to collaborate
with the world of cinema and was, in fact, a project for the film Moontide (1942), starring Jean Gabin. Dali was hired by Fox to work on the film (known in French as La Péniche de l’Amour) under director Fritz Lang. However, following a row with Fox, Lang was replaced by Archie Mayo, and Dali’s designs remained unused. It was not until Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound of 1945, starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman – the first film to be based on psychoanalysis – that Dali’s
universe was combined with scriptwriting and found its way on to the
silver screen. This collaboration was not without fruit – even if,
ultimately, it was for Dali a source of reflection on painting and cinema. Many years later – among young film-makers looking to Dali’s startling, ambiguous world for inspiration – the wheel would turn full circle.

MASTERPIECES & MINIATURES

One of the striking paradoxes about Salvador Dali was that he produced his greatest works on small panels. His Surrealist icon The Persistence of Memory or Melting Watches (1931), owned by the New York MoMA and to be shown in the Pompidou Centre’s Dali retrospective this winter, measures just 24 x 33cm. His Portrait ofPaul Eluard (1929), sold on the international market for nearly €16.5m in 2011, measures 33 x 25cm; while The Spectre of Vermeer of Delft (1934), sold for nearly €1.9m in 2007, measures just 22 x 17cm. Like a Gothic or Renaissance Master, Dali
was able to convey the power of his visions in peerless detail on
modestly sized panels. Given its manifold pictorial and intellectual
qualities, The Sewing-Machine must count one such masterpiece.

SOTHEBY'S Impressionist and Modern Art February
4, 2003

Alongside
Dali's iconic painting of

Jeune Vierge Autosodomisee par les cornes de sa
propre chastete is a second important work by the artist from 1942.

Naissance
du Nouveau Monde is a depiction of the cycle of life, death and rebirth and was
commissioned to be used as an illustration in the December 1942 edition of
Esquire magazine. It is estimated at £700,000-900,000. dance in its broad
connotations, reminding us of the social satire that is inherent in the
Expressionist imagination (est: £450,000-600,000).